CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: A £350 strawberry? Now that’s a showstopper Mr Hollywood!
Paul Holywood Eats Japan
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Garden Rescue
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Now we know the monetary value of a Hollywood Handshake.
Bread-maker Paul bestows them like knighthoods on Bake Off, but he was willing to offer one in exchange for a single £350 strawberry as his Japanese gourmet tour ended.
Unluckily for him, the Japanese don’t go in much for handshakes. A bow is more polite. The strawberry grower dipped his head respectfully, chuckled and waited for a sheaf of 1,000-yen banknotes.
The mouthful of soft red fruit was the size of a snooker ball, nurtured under humid plastic cloches on a bed of rice hay.
Tuesday night saw the third and final part of Channel 4 series ‘Paul Hollywood Eats Japan’ starring the celebrity foodie (meeting)
Our Scouse foodie insisted, on the third and final part of Paul Hollywood Eats Japan (C4), that it was easily worth the price of a month’s food shopping for the average family.
It tasted, he said, ‘like an apple meets a strawberry meets a grape meets a whole bunch of red roses that you’re smelling. It makes you happy.’ It made the grower a whole lot happier, judging by the size of his grin.
Strange how, if something is expensive enough, people will assume it has to be worth the investment.
What outraged Paul was not the lone super-priced strawberry but the punnet of lesser fruit on sale for £17.
If he thinks that is profiteering, he’s never been to Wimbledon.
At every step of his journey, Paul has been surrounded by Japanese guides — comedians, chefs, wrestlers, YouTubers and even a cross-dressing heavy metal singer. He didn’t look at ease with any of them.
The only person with whom he seemed to strike up a real friendship was his British cameraman, bantering with him and encouraging him to share the food.
The only person Paul manage to strike up a relationship with during the show was his British cameraman
However much Paul protested he was in culinary heaven, smacking his lips over platters of Wagyu beef from street vendors or slurping bowls of noodles in eating contests, he never lost the look of a man who was counting the minutes till he could go home.
He’s no traveller, unlike rail workers Lisa and Paul in Havant, near Portsmouth, whose back yard had been left a wasteland by builders but who dreamed of looking out onto a Mediterranean landscape.
Naturally, they called in Charlie Dimmock and her team on Garden Rescue (BBC1). Charlie promised them a Greek island vista, with tumbledown village walls and the sound of cicadas in the olive trees.
Charlie Dimmock (right) was once again to the rescue on BBC’s Garden Rescue as a couple from Havant sought to transform their garden into a Mediterranean landscape
What she delivered were some breeze blocks painted blue-and-white, with a folding table and chair for the occasional evening with a bottle of ouzo.
It wasn’t exactly The Durrells. Still, this low-budget afternoon show is always packed with ideas — enough to ensure any gardener will come away with a few inspirations.
Perhaps the best of Charlie’s schemes this time was a ‘lavender walk’: a narrow gravel path, closely bordered by dense bushels of aromatic blue.
Anyone who has seen a £5 pot of lavender annex an entire flowerbed within a couple of years will know how fast this stuff grows — it’s like scented knotweed.
I loved the suggestion that, by keeping the path tight, people walking along it would stir up clouds of fragrance. That’s a smashing touch.
Despite an awful amount of trying, Dimmock’s puns and jokes didn’t really get off the ground
Otherwise, this episode was overwhelmed with puns about trains. Paul had a model railway he wanted to run down the garden.
For some reason, Charlie thought that was hilarious.
She was constantly making chuff-chuff-toot-toot noises, crying ‘Full steam ahead’ and playing Thomas The Tank Engine with her assistants, Chelsea Flower Show gold medallists Harry and David Rich.
Charlie made the basic TV presenter’s mistake of thinking that if one terrible train joke was amusing, a dozen would be uproarious. They really weren’t.
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